| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Walden by Henry David Thoreau: engineers and firemen and brakemen, and those passengers who have a
season ticket and see it often, are better men for the sight. The
engineer does not forget at night, or his nature does not, that he
has beheld this vision of serenity and purity once at least during
the day. Though seen but once, it helps to wash out State Street
and the engine's soot. One proposes that it be called "God's Drop."
I have said that Walden has no visible inlet nor outlet, but it
is on the one hand distantly and indirectly related to Flint's Pond,
which is more elevated, by a chain of small ponds coming from that
quarter, and on the other directly and manifestly to Concord River,
which is lower, by a similar chain of ponds through which in some
Walden |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories by Mark Twain: sixty-seven. Waking and sleeping, the three women spent their days
and night in adoring the young girl; in watching the movements
of her sweet spirit in the mirror of her face; in refreshing their
souls with the vision of her bloom and beauty; in listening to the
music of her voice; in gratefully recognizing how rich and fair
for them was the world with this presence in it; in shuddering
to think how desolate it would be with this light gone out of it.
By nature--and inside--the aged aunts were utterly dear and lovable
and good, but in the matter of morals and conduct their training
had been so uncompromisingly strict that it had made them
exteriorly austere, not to say stern. Their influence was effective
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from A Drama on the Seashore by Honore de Balzac: eyes, and his stoical immobility could be compared only to the
immutable granite masses that surrounded him. His eyes moved slowly,
his body remaining rigid as though he were petrified. Then, having
cast upon us that look which struck us like a blow, he turned his eyes
once more to the limitless ocean, and gazed upon it, in spite of its
dazzling light, as eagles gaze at the sun, without lowering his
eyelids. Try to remember, dear uncle, one of those old oaks, whose
knotty trunks, from which the branches have been lopped, rise with
weird power in some lonely place, and you will have an image of this
man. Here was a ruined Herculean frame, the face of an Olympian Jove,
destroyed by age, by hard sea toil, by grief, by common food, and
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The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche: appropriate foreign elements reveals itself in a strong tendency
to assimilate the new to the old, to simplify the manifold, to
overlook or repudiate the absolutely contradictory; just as it
arbitrarily re-underlines, makes prominent, and falsifies for
itself certain traits and lines in the foreign elements, in every
portion of the "outside world." Its object thereby is the
incorporation of new "experiences," the assortment of new things
in the old arrangements--in short, growth; or more properly, the
FEELING of growth, the feeling of increased power--is its object.
This same will has at its service an apparently opposed impulse
of the spirit, a suddenly adopted preference of ignorance, of
Beyond Good and Evil |
